Environmental storytelling in horror game design is vital! I say it over and over in this blog, but even the most unsettling monster pales in comparison to the dread of entering a room that somehow already knows you’re there. An empty room is a truly unsettling thing… particularly a large room, and especially one you’ve never been in before.
Is this why horror games so often centre around haunted houses, abandoned hospitals, or alien corridors? What is it about such digital spaces that seem to remember us, long after we shut the game down?
As a game design lecturer fascinated by horror games, I’m obsessed not just with what scares us—but where, and why. Over and over again, I return to the same eerie realization: the best horror games rarely tell stories through dialogue or cutscenes. Instead, they let the game environment speak. The ghosts should be embedded in the environment. In this way, they are true ghosts—not simply computational mechanics. No designer, no matter how skilled, can create the mechanics that happen in our own head.
Terrifying Spaces in Horror Game Design
Creating a fear of space in players (specifically through the uncanny manipulation of architecture) is central to environmental storytelling in horror. It is a core pillar of supernatural horror game design. It is the hand of the skilled level designer that ensures horror doesn’t just happen in a place; often, the place is the horror.
Researchers like Kirkland (2009) and Vidler (1992) describe how spatial disorientation, architectural claustrophobia, and symbolic distortion provoke psychological unease. In horror games like Silent Hill and Alien: Isolation, the environment becomes the antagonist, twisting and conspiring to trap, mislead, or unnerve the player.
Game worlds are often constructed as “narrative architecture” (Jenkins & Squire, 2004), where meaning emerges through the player’s movement through space. A crumbling asylum is not just a level; it becomes a narrative about institutional trauma. A sealed-off corridor transcends its gameplay function to become a metaphor for psychological repression.
Design Takeaway: Construct your levels so that architecture speaks before the player encounters anything else. Horror game environments can carry fear, memory, and meaning all by themselves.
Fear, Catharsis, and the Lingering Presence of Horror Environments
Through well-researched and emotionally intelligent design, horror game environments elicit real physiological responses: racing heartbeats, held breath, tensed shoulders. Xylakis et al. (2024) found that changes in lighting, architecture, and ambient sound can reliably predict fear and surprise in viewers of horror gameplay—proving the emotional power of environmental design in horror games.
These effects aren’t just jump scares. Symbolic and emotional spaces linger in the mind long after the game ends. A warped child’s bedroom, a grotesque gallery of self-portraits, or a silent town square where footsteps echo—these are the kinds of spaces that leave players thinking about the meaning of their experience long after they’ve turned off the screen.
Design Takeaway: Avoid relying on jump scares alone. Let your architectural horror build tension slowly. Use contrast—light and dark, silence and noise, chaos and order—to control your player’s emotional rhythm.
The Uncanny Loop: Why We Revisit Familiar Horror Spaces
Let’s talk about architecture—not the monumental kind, but the spaces we live in: homes, schools, hospitals. These places are deeply familiar to us. Strip that familiarity away, and what remains is a void—one our minds are compelled to fill with something frightening.
There is something mythic about horror architecture. A mansion that loops and shifts becomes more than level design—it becomes a metaphor for the subconscious. As Freud (1919) and Skirrow (1986) suggest, many horror spaces resemble wombs, tombs, or corrupted homes. They are distorted memories made playable.
We return to these environments not just because they scare us, but because they feel like they know us. They are simultaneously intimate and threatening. In Layers of Fear, the player navigates a morphing house that reflects a crumbling psyche. In Silent Hill, guilt and trauma manifest spatially. These environments feel deeply personal—as though they weren’t just designed for us, but because of us.
Design Takeaway: Think of your horror environments as interactive dreams—half-symbolic, half-logical. Let players feel as though they’ve entered a space that already knows them.
Conclusion: The Haunted Memory of Space in Horror Game Development
Do we play horror games to confront fear? Perhaps. But maybe what lingers most isn’t the monster—but the space the monster once occupied. The hallway that was too long. The room that felt wrong. The building that dreamed of us.
In supernatural horror game development, game environments are never static. They are haunted not just by ghosts, but by meaning.
References
Freud, S., 1919. The uncanny. Imago, 5(5–6), pp.297–324. [Reprinted in: Freud, S., 1955. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII. London: Hogarth Press, pp.217–256.]
Jenkins, H. and Squire, K., 2004. The art of contested spaces: The meaning of spatial storytelling. In: N. Wardrip-Fruin and P. Harrigan, eds. First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp.56–65.
Kirkland, E., 2009. Horror videogames and the uncanny. Games and Culture, 4(2), pp.129–148.
Vidler, A., 1992. The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Xylakis, E., Liapis, A. and Yannakakis, G.N., 2024. Modelling emotional experience in horror game viewing: Predictive affective models from audiovisual features. Entertainment Computing, 46, 100608. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.entcom.2023.100608